


Fire's Embrace

by enkelimagnus



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb helps Molly through an episode, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Caleb Widogast, Lullabies, M/M, POV Mollymauk Tealeaf, Panic Attacks, Pining Caleb Widogast, Resurrected Mollymauk Tealeaf, Self-harming tendencies, Xhorhouse (Critical Role), Yiddish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:49:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26303707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enkelimagnus/pseuds/enkelimagnus
Summary: Mollymauk has a very bad panic attack after a nightmare. Caleb finds a way to help.
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 18
Kudos: 135





	Fire's Embrace

The library of the Xhorhaus regularly had a fire lit. That was why it often found Molly sneaking in the room in the middle of the night. 

Nights could run cold. Molly hated the cold. It woke him up with shivers and a strong sense of wrongness. Dread tugged at his stomach. He’d woken up twice to frozen limbs and a pitch black, smothered in dirt. He had no desire to ever wake up like that again. 

More nights than not, he dragged his sleep-heavy limbs to the library and sat by the fire, letting the warmth of it comfort him and lull him to rest. It reminded him of long nights with the carnival, staying up for hours after a show, drinking and snuggling up by the fire to be able to fall asleep. He’d set a couple of blankets on fire by doing that, but he couldn’t stop himself. He needed to be warm.

Most nights, he woke up to ash and a woolen blanket on his body. Sometimes, Frumpkin was cuddled into his chest too, soft and warm and purring. Caleb never said anything about it, but it had to be him. The blanket smelled of fire and human. Only Caleb smelled like that. 

Something changed one specific night. The worst night Molly had in what felt like years. 

He woke up with a scream, struggling against the sheets and blankets that had wrapped around his limbs as he tossed and turned and tried to escape the graves in his mind. He was sweating, he was cold, he couldn’t stand being alone. But Yasha was gone, called by the Stormlord once again. And he couldn’t do this. 

He threw himself out of bed. His legs shook. His head was dizzy. He couldn’t breathe. He stumbled through the house. He was probably making a raucous but no one was moving. The stairs were daunting and he almost fell down most of them. Everything ached. Everything was cold. He wanted to throw himself in the fire just to be warm.

Nails digging into his own skin to keep himself grounded, he walked down the stairs and towards the library door. Sweet, but too distant, pain wasn’t enough to keep him to the present. Dirt. Moons. Molly coughed loudly. At least his mouth was empty. Cold. Ice in his bones. Dirt.

“Mollymauk?” 

The voice rang in his mind and he blinked, hard, chasing the phantom dirt and the shadows.

The door to the library was open wide. At one of the desks, the one the closest to the fireplace, Caleb was sitting. Shadows enveloped him but the flames played on his face, bathing himit in gold. With hair like melting copper and warm light, he looked like fire personified. 

Molly wanted to be wrapped in his arms more now than ever before. He wanted the warmth of his fire around him, and he didn’t care if it burned as long as he wasn’t cold anymore. 

Caleb stood up from the desk when Molly didn’t move or reply. Warm hands rested on his arm. 

“Gods, Mollymauk, you’re freezing,” the man gasped. 

His hands were moving a lot, and he had to grab him more to steady them. Or maybe it was Molly’s arms that moved. He looked down. He was shaking. Badly. Cold. Dirt. 

“Fire. Fire, please,” he croaked out, trying to make Caleb understand what he needed. It seemed to work.

Hands still on his arms, warm and big and gripping him hard, guided him towards the fireplace. Every step was an effort, but he made it to the plush carpet in front of the fire, Caleb helping him down. He reached towards the fire, the flames licking at his fingertips. Maybe it was supposed to hurt. He was too far away and too cold to notice. Or to care. 

Caleb’s hands grabbed his wrists again. “You’re going to burn yourself.”

“I’m fucking cold,” Molly growled, fangs on display. 

The touch was good, really good, and everything was less fuzzy. He couldn’t see the freckles on Caleb’s face, it was a little blurry but it was getting better. It was less shapes and more… things. 

“Nein. I will not let you hurt yourself,” Caleb said firmly. 

Molly wanted to hiss at him. This wasn’t what he needed. He didn’t need to be kept from the fire. He needed to be in it. To be warm. He wrapped his arms around himself, if he couldn’t put them in the fire.

This was bad. This was terrible. Yasha was gone. None of these people knew what to do when he was like this, fuck, they’d never seen him like this before, feral and terrified. Molly wanted to scream and fight and stop being so fucking cold. 

“Hands,” he muttered after a while. “Hands on me. Please.” He reached for Caleb, grabbing his wrist. He didn’t pull him closer. He was too shaky to do that. 

Caleb hesitated. Molly remembered he hated closeness. That was one thing he remembered, clearly. From before dying, from after dying, from… the day he’d walked into that inn and seen dirty skin and blue eyes. He let go of his wrist and curled up on himself. He could just stay there next to the fire and wait until the ice melted. 

He wrapped his tail around himself and closed his eyes and waited. The fire wasn’t enough. It was warming him but he was very far away. He was so tired and so… distant. The sounds of the fire crackling was a backdrop to the flashes in his mind. Dirt. Moons. Cold. The dark… the darkness. It swallowed him again and again. The glaive in his chest, Lorenzo’s face, Caleb and Beau and Nott screaming.

All the screaming and the fire crackles muddled in his mind like a weird soup, and he was drowning in it. 

Suddenly, something wrapped around him. Arms. A body. There was a body behind him, legs on either side of him. A cat in front of him. 

“I don’t know what to do, Mollymauk,” Caleb whispered in his ear. “I… I’m just gonna do the exact contrary to what I would like done to me when I have an attack, ja? Because you’re very much the contrary to me, as a person.” 

Molly leaned back against Caleb’s chest, eyes closing. 

“You’re very cold. You’re never this cold to the touch, I know that even if I haven’t touched you that many times,” Caleb continued. “I hope I’m doing okay.”

Molly’s breathing was coming in easier. The voice in his ear, the hands against him, the warmth of a person, a fire and a cat brought him back to life. He laid limply in Caleb’s arms, letting him hold him. Warmer. Better. 

The glaive disappeared. The dirt lifted from him. The moons were still there, but they were smiling. His goddess was smiling at him from up there, from the moon and the night. He was draped in Caleb’s arms. 

“You’re slowly warming up,” Caleb’s voice was a low rumble. The Zemnian accent was more present when he whispered. “Seeing you like this is very distressing, Kätzchen. You’re usually very loud and very bright, Mollymauk.”

_ Mollymauk _ . The name was familiar and big and bright and like a tether to the present. He was Mollymauk. He was okay. He was safe. He was alive. He wasn’t buried.

He wasn’t in a grave, he wasn’t buried. He was alive and safe and someone was holding him. Caleb was holding him, tightly and warmly and it was the most comfortable he’d been in what felt like hours. 

“ _ Shlof, shlof, shlof _ ,” Caleb started singing under his breath. It sounded like Zemnian. “ _ Der tate vet forn in dorf _ ...” He kept going quietly. “ _ Vet er brengen an epele, Vet zayn gezunt dos kepele! _ ”

It was out of tune and it wasn’t very right, but one word after the other, Molly felt himself pulled back to the warm embrace of the man, to the fire and to the purring, rumbling cat on his lap. It was slow and Caleb kept singing. Molly wondered if the song had an end.

As always, coming back fully in his body was a little brutal. The tethers that had sunk into his mind and started pulling him back were not delicate. Caleb kissed the top of his head, in between the horns, muttering things in Zemnian and the tethers pulled one last time, hard and sudden.

Molly’s entire body shuddered as he came back to it. He was warm, hot even. He was comfortable and held. He wasn’t shivering as much anymore. Caleb was humming under his breath words Molly couldn’t understand. 

“Caleb,” Molly whispered.

Caleb stopped humming. Molly wished he would continue.

“Are you back?” Caleb asked quietly. “Are you okay?” 

It was a lot of questions. But Molly nodded at both. “The song was sweet,” he continued. He was exhausted now, but at least he was out of the episode, back in his body, safe and warm. 

“Danke,” Caleb whispered. “My mama used to sing it to me when I was little.” He huffed in Molly’s hair. “I know you’re not a baby. But I couldn’t think of anything else.” 

“T’ was good,” Molly sighed, still leaning hard against Caleb’s chest. His eyes were blinking out the tiredness but it wasn’t enough.

Caleb moved for a moment, making Molly lose a little of precious contact. Molly was about to hiss when an arm slid under his knees and he was pulled up. Caleb wasn’t steady on his legs and he muttered Scheisse under his breath more times Molly could count. Little time passed before he was put down on a mattress. In a bed.

The bed didn’t smell like Molly’s. It smelled like Caleb. And that was nice. He curled up into him quietly, yawning. 

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Caleb whispered behind him. He shifted until he was holding him from behind, pulling the blankets up over them. Molly hummed lazily. His tail had started shifting again. “ _ A gute nakht, gelipter _ … Mollymauk.” 

**Author's Note:**

> The song Shlof, Shlof, Shlof is a Yiddish lullaby. 
> 
> A gute nakht, gelipter means good night, lover in Yiddish.


End file.
